The Shadow of the Wind

If it is said a reader lives a thousand lives before they die, how about an author? Telling the life story of Julian Carax, a mysterious writer, and that of Daniel Sempere, the eleven-year-old boy who picks, from the labyrinthine shelves of a forgotten library, exactly the last book written by Carax, The Shadow of the Wind is a novel about the art of reading and writing.

When Daniel Sempere is led by his father to an enigmatic place in the historical heart of Barcelona, called “The Cemetery of Forgotten Books”, he is tasked with deciding, from the thousands of lost volumes before him, which one would be the book that, in the exact the words of his father, he would guard and treasure for the rest of his life. “The Shadow of the Wind”, by Julian Carax, is the one he chooses. However, Daniel is soon consumed by those alluring pages, being fascinated not only by its story but also by the one of its author: it’s the secret behind Carax’s complete lack of notoriety the mystery that most fascinates Daniel and propels him into his journey.

Daniel’s search for the story behind the novel, and the process of its creation, becomes an obsession, endangering him and those that he cares about. But, indifferent to the maxim that some things are better left in the past, the young man refuses to let go and ends up relating to Julian Carax in an extremely personal and almost self-destructive way.

The Shadow of the Wind has the heart of a gothic story, with the past constantly coming back to haunt the characters. Narrated in the first-person, the novel is structured around the findings that Daniel makes about Julian’s life, focusing on the doomed love story of this mysterious author.

This forbidden romance, whose tragic ending is readily revealed to us, becomes increasingly important with time, eventually linking most of the subplots in the novel. Working with typical elements of tragic romances, such as the family that forbids the relationship and the resulting plan to run away together, the book’s strength comes with the parallel it creates with the relationship that Daniel starts to build with another character, making it easier for us to root for its success: after all, at least one of these relationships must end in a positive note.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón excels in the construction of the narrative, punctuating the main events in the lives of both Julian and Daniel with constant revelations and twists that keep pushing the plot forward, never breaking the momentum. He also makes great use of Gothic elements to create an atmosphere of mystery and dread: besides the recurring presence of mist-covered streets, and an enormous abandoned mansion reputed to be haunted, there’s also a dark figure in a black jacket that begins to stalk Daniel, whose description corresponds exactly to the character of the Devil in the kid’s book.

Zafón’s prose is formidable. He turns all the most virtuous characters into poets, creating a stark contrast with the villains, whose harsh and crude words reveal their dark hearts. The standout is Fermín Romero de Torres, a beggar whose sentences are always so full of wit (“Destiny is usually just around the corner. Like a thief, a hooker, or a lottery vendor: its three most common personifications. But what destiny does not do is home visits”), offering some humorous insight on life, that astute readers will probably try to memorize them all to tell to their partners and pretend to be that smart.

The setting also plays a crucial role in the story. The Shadow of the Wind takes place in two distinct Barcelonas, one before World War II, which is controlled by a few families of great renown, a time where it’s your surname and lineage that decide your future; and the other one during the post-war period, where social inequality is still present, but the large families no longer exist, leaving a few abandoned mansions in their place. By making a shifting between these two realities, the story pushes us to reflect on whether the fate of the main characters, Daniel and Julián, is determined by the period in which they live or if it is only their actions that condemn them.

These historical periods also match the tone and tension of their respective stories. Julián Carax’s story, for example, follows the Spanish Civil War and is filled with a strong sense of urgency and dread, teasing how everything is bound to fall apart for the author, and how his love story had no real chance of success. Meanwhile, the story of Daniel Sempere, begins in 1945 and follows a time, if still traumatized, full of discoveries and opportunities, in which even a beggar can be a poet and still manage to get on top in life.

The book’s only significant issue happens near the end, in a chapter about exposition, narrated from the point of view of a woman named Nuria Monfort. In this chapter, Zafón is so excited by the tragic lyricism and romanticism of the story of Julián Carax that he makes Nuria describe situations, dialogues, and actions that she never witnessed or could have known about, especially with that level of detail. However, since this chapter is one of the most emotional and rewarding in the novel, which would certainly have been lost if Nuria had not gone overboard with her narration, we can excuse it as a… creative liberty.

The Shadow of the Wind builds a great parallel between the stories of Daniel and Julian to show that, in the end, both author and reader can set out on a similar journey through the same book. And if Zafón seems to be pessimistic about the future of the art (“Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it’s an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day”), the excellent reception that the novel had worldwide may, perhaps, constitute a proof of the opposite.

December 11, 2024.

Originally published in Portuguese on March 11, 2015.